Our first proper “late” row, since we’re now proud mebers of division 2. Time at the start to say hello to Amelie before being rudely interrupted by the 4 minute gun. I was busily trying to plaster up my hand having torn a callus off and… oooohhh, it did hurt a bit. Meanwhile, back at the rowing. Tabs 7 were sandwich boat, but we knew we were faster than them, and anyway they were tired after rowing over; they faded away after about 20 strokes. So our aim was tabs 8, who we chased unsuccessfuly on the first night. But we knew that ahead of them was St Ives, who they had failed to catch the previous night; and we knew they knew that we were faster than them. So I don’t think they had much hope, and in the end after we got through the choppy water under the bridge smoothly and did a couple of pushes we had them, roughly at the first corner. All hail the mighty Chesterton M2, as our club captain put it.

Perhaps I could explain that we’re not wet because of the race: just for once we had a pretty dry and stylish row, if you quietly forget about the giant crab during our exhibition start outside the Plough. No, the water is because after the beer tree we swapped the boat order, so we were all on the wrong side, and put our cox at 6 and 2 in to cox. So that was a bit splashy.

Mens 1 produced another comedy finish, only this time it was pretty well the entire division. It all started late, apparently because there was a huge argument at the start after Robs decided to row with the same illegal crew they had rowed yesterday and had their bumped disqualified for. In the gut city (4) 4 bumped 9’s (3), but so thoroughly that they blocked the whole river (I think there was some question of a crab, and the cox getting lifted into the water). And so all the rest of the division was a row-over. Robs 2 and 3 livened the return up by having a race down the reach, and our M1 joined in; from my distance it looked inconclusive.

Comments

OT: I was going to reference the climate section of the WP Oligocene article, but when I looked I found I couldn’t since some lunatic named Morbas has been allowed to vandalize it. This is the offending text:

“The Oligocene Epoch temperature is a clearly defined notch in a general temperature decline across the Paleogene Period. Evidence indicates a galactic causal. From 3C321 (NASA, 2007), a Black Hole Quasar was found to emit relativistic ISM particles in a narrow beam at about distances equal to our Sol Galactic core distance. Glaciating (cooling) is a result of ISM Heliosphere reduction and ISM penetration (PCFrisch, 2006). The Oligocene is the Neotectonic cycle of a 220million year planetary equidistant rupture (PER) geologic cycle (Kvet, 1991), extending to 4650Ma (Million years ago). These likely coincide with a Galactic Central Bar alignment at Sol. The Oligocene, a biosphere stressed by temperature and probable reduction of Heliosphere Gamma Ray shielding is understandably an epoch of few new species.”

Eek. That’s truly opaquely put even if true, and I doubt that much of it is.

[I’ve done what you should have done, which is press the “edit” tab and got rid of it. Ha, lazy commentators… :-) -W]

Lets see, if we subtract the PER geologic terminators in the Phanerozoic we end up with eleven having a average period of 70M-year std dev 9M. If we further group these in triples, we get 210M-year std dev 9M-year. The triple groups correlate with the 2+2+2 Galactic structure. The central bar is at 30 degress lead to Sol Galactic Orbit position. That leads to a 0.86 (0.1) degree / million year recession rate on two counts. The galactic structure and the Oligocene Intercept. VLA HII mapping of the galaxy, overlayed on JPL optical mapping shows all the arms start along the central bar axis projection.